With a grim set of facts and a hard way to go, Konrad Gerhard Walde Ziegler of Lee & Ziegler is asking the Georgia Supreme Court to overturn for a second time the murder conviction of Melissa Norris on charges of killing her father in 1995 while he sat on his sofa.

"It's only a very narrow issue," Ziegler told the Daily Report before his Tuesday video teleconference oral argument before a high court closed by the novel coronavirus pandemic. He said Norris had an excellent defense for her second trial in 2017 with Rodney Zell of Zell & Zell after Zell won the reversal of her first conviction from 1997. Ziegler said District Attorney Bill Doupe also did an excellent job, and it was a clean trial before McDuffie County Superior Court Judge Thomas Britt Hammond of the Toombs Judicial Circuit.

But when the Georgia Public Defender Council asked Ziegler to handle the new appeal, he found one possible mistake. He told the high court the judge failed to charge the jury on mistake of fact—a common law concept that could negate guilt if a person was operating under a mistaken belief.

"What is the mistake of fact?" Justice Keith Blackwell asked during Tuesday's argument, almost immediately.

The mistake of fact in this case, Ziegler answered, was that Norris said she didn't know the gun was loaded.

"Even if she didn't know the gun was loaded, how is it justified to put a gun to her father's head and pull the trigger?" Blackwell asked.

That question kept coming up. Ziegler's response was that it should have been a question for the jury.

Even if Ziegler wins, the best he can hope for is a new trial. And two juries have already found Norris guilty of murder—a fact the DA was quick to point out when it was his time to argue. His predecessor and former boss, longtime DA Dennis Sanders, prosecuted the case the first time, although Doupe remembered it well. Doupe prosecuted it himself 20 years later. Doupe was able to tell the justices that\—through the magic of Zoom teleconferencing—he was making his argument standing "in the very same courtroom."

As Doupe also pointed out, Norris gave completely different testimony the second time around. In the first trial, she said it was her older brother who killed her father, not she. In the second trial, she said she did it but that she was only playing with her brother's gun and didn't know it was loaded.

But Doupe said the killing did not look accidental to him. He said the gun was pressed so close against the skin that it left a contact wound with the imprint of a muzzle.

Doupe's recall of the details was stunning. Soon Chief Justice Harold Melton, who wrote the opinion reversing the first conviction, directed the DA to focus on the narrow issue of the appeal—whether Norris knew the gun was loaded.

Doupe argued that she never even checked.

"The evidence was overwhelming that she executed her father," Doupe said. "There is nothing in the world that would justify putting a gun to a person's head and pulling the trigger."

Whatever the justices decide this time, the appeal is about more than a possible mistake on a legal concept. It's about a now-40-year-old woman who has lived most of her life at the Lee Arrendale State Prison in the Appalachian foothills of Habersham County. Her sentence was life plus five years both times. She has been behind bars since she was 15.

In response to an inquiry, a spokesman for the Georgia Board of Pardons and Parole said Thursday Norris has been moved to Pulaski State Prison in Hawkinsville. She is up for parole in May. But she has already been considered and denied five times.

"It was just a stupid kid playing with a stupid gun that was in the house without the parents' permission," said Zell, the defense attorney who won the reversal of the first conviction on the grounds that the judge failed to instruct the jury on a lesser charge of manslaughter. "How much time does a 15-year-old girl deserve?"